


Haunted By Him

by BlitheBells



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anastasia AU, Bucky as Anastasia, F/M, Natasha as Dmitri, Steve and Bucky reunion, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 20:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 19,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3582078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlitheBells/pseuds/BlitheBells
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If you want to pass yourself off as Bucky, you gotta be a little more friendly,” she accuses.<br/>“Oh no,” the Soldier grumbles. “Don’t tell me this Barnes guy is some sort of cheerful do-gooder.” Natalia shrugs, shifting her bag over her shoulder, then slips it off and hands it to him. He takes it with his left, the stronger arm, and stares at her.<br/>“Bucky Barnes would hold a girl’s bag for her,” Natalia says and the Winter Soldier glares.<br/>“Would he,” he replies dryly and Natalia just smiles at him smugly and turns back around.<br/>“Come on, Mr Barnes, we’re almost to the station,” she says and he follows her grumpily.</p><p>Artwork by the amazing Aimee, at buckynatashas.tumblr.com</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The Winter Soldier escapes that night, when the guards’ backs are turned and all the lights are off. He’s timed it perfectly, waited weeks out of pure fear, but now he’s going to try.  
He bursts out of the building and into the yard. No one’s seen him yet and no one knows. They think he’s still in his cell, but he’s taking a running leap at the gate now and he scales it, throwing himself over the barbed wire and he falls several feet to the ground. He muffles a cry, biting down on his gloved left hand and grunting and pain shoots up his ankle. He’s broken it or sprained it or something and he sees rips in his pants where the barbed wire tore. Blood is bubbling up, but all he feels are his broken ankle and the adrenaline. And, of course, the fear.  
But everything has gone according to plan and no one has noticed him yet. So the Winter Soldier drags himself painfully to his feet and starts to force himself to run.  
There’s a building nearby, an abandoned lot, and he heads there, hoping he can hide. It’s not part of the original plan, but he knows he won’t get very far on this ankle and he needs a place to look at it. He’s hoping they won’t notice his disappearance until morning, by which time he’ll be long gone.  
So the Winter Soldier hobbles into the building and finds himself deep in the depths of it, up to his eyes in dust, and it’s everything he can do not to start coughing. When he thinks he’s safe, he drops to the ground and starts taking off his boot, chewing on his tongue to distract himself from the pain.  
He’s never tried to escape before. He’s always been too afraid to try and he’s certainly afraid now, but it’s too late to go back. It’s do or die.  
His ankle is twisted, and it hurts to move. He rolls up his pant leg and is considering tearing strips out of it to bind his ankle when a voice makes him freeze with fear.  
“Hey!” A woman’s voice shouts and the Winter Soldier’s head snaps up. On the other side of the room is a tall, redheaded woman. She’s in rags and she’s covered in dirt and he doesn’t know who she is, but he still panics. He doesn’t think he can pull himself back up to his feet again and so he starts scooting himself away frantically. All he can think is, ‘I’ve been caught’.

“Who are you?” The woman cries and she approaches him faster than he can pull himself back. He can kill her. He’ll have to kill her. But at this second, panic is seizing control of every muscle in his body and he just wants to get away.  
“Don’t hurt me,” he hears himself plead.  
“I’m not going to do anything to you,” the woman says and now she’s standing over him and he thinks his heart has stopped. She brushes hair out of her face and kneels down to look at him. He’s trembling, his entire body, and he holds himself as far away from her as possible. “What are you doing here?” She asks him accusingly. His eyes flicker down to his ankle for a second and the woman follows his gaze. “You need help,” she reasons and the Winter Soldier nods.  
“I have to go,” he tells her. “I have to hide. I have to run.”  
“Alright, calm down,” the woman says and she reaches out and takes his ankle and the pain makes him gasp. Her hands on his skin are cold and tears are starting to sting the corners of his eyes. “I said calm down,” the woman repeated herself, looking at him with raised eyebrows, and then he watches her take a roll of gauze from her pocket and hold it up in front of them. “Are you going to let me fix this?” She asks. “It just looks sprained.”  
He decides for that one second to trust her. He doesn’t have another choice.  
He nods slowly and clenches his teeth while she wraps the gauze tightly around his ankle. When she’s almost finished, she looks up into his face and their eyes meet and she holds him there. Her mouth opens a little as she stares and he notices her eyes are clear blue and he doesn’t like the way she’s looking at him.  
“What?” He says. The woman pulls back and reaches into her pocket again and pulls out a square of paper, a photo. She doesn’t offer to show him yet and instead examines it herself.  
“Wow,” she says and holds the photo up to the Winter Soldier’s face. He pulls away uncomfortably, but she’s still scrutinizing him with those blue eyes. “Same nose, same mouth, same chin. That’s remarkable.” She laughs. “This can’t be happening.”  
“What are you talking about?” The Winter Soldier asks. He’s still in defense mode, every muscle in his body taut, and he leans as far apart from her as he can, looking her up and down.  
“Bucky Barnes,” the woman says and she turns the photo around so the Winter Soldier can see. “You two could be brothers.” The Winter Soldier squints at the picture. It’s of a clean cut man in an army uniform, grinning at the camera. He doesn’t know what to say. He supposes he agrees, but it’s really the least of his problems right now. He stays silent.  
The woman turns the photo back around and examines them both again.  
“Your eyes are different,” she says excitedly. “But you’re close enough to be convincing.”  
“Convincing to whom??” The Winter Soldier exclaims. His ankle is wrapped up completely now and the pain is starting to subside and he begins to scoot himself away again to try to stand and the woman reaches forward and grabs his arm in an attempt to stop him. Everything in the Winter Soldier cries out, an alarm system of fear, and he yanks his arm away from her.  
“Don’t touch me,” he says in a low growl and the woman puts her hands up in defense.  
“Alright, fine,” she says. “Whatever you want, Bucky.”  
“That’s not my name,” the Winter Soldier replies.  
“Then what is your name?” She asks and sirens go off in the distance, interrupting her. The Soldier looks up, gasping.  
“I need to get somewhere safe,” he breathes.  
“How about America?” The woman asks and he looks over at her, confused. She’s holding up a pair of tickets now, leaning back on her butt with her arms resting on her knees. “One for me and one for the long, lost Sargeant.”  
“I told you, I’m not your guy,” the Winter Soldier snaps and he scrambles now into a standing position. The woman’s blue eyes go cold. He leans against a wall for support and watches her stand slowly.  
“I know that,” she says. “My guy is dead, after all. But I need someone to fake it for a while and you look like you could have fallen right off the Barnes family tree, so what do you say?”  
The Winter Soldier swallows. He looks behind him, where the sirens are wailing and he can hear feet on pavement, people searching for him, and then back to this strange redheaded woman, still waving her tickets in his face.  
“Free ride to America,” she taunts him. “Take it or leave it.”  
He can hear their voices now, getting closer. There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Panic washes over him.  
“Tick tock,” the woman says.  
“I’ll take it,” he says hastily and with that, she grins slyly and slips the tickets back into her bag. An instant later, she’s grabbing his arm and pulling him into a hiding spot just a few feet away behind a curtain.  
The sirens wail and the pursuers get closer. The Winter Soldier presses his back against the wall behind them and sinks to the floor, covering his mouth with both hands because his breathing is becoming loud and his entire body trembles.  
What seems like hours later, the world falls silent again. The sirens move on and the people are gone and when the woman pushes back the curtain, the Winter Soldier bursts out, sucking in breaths and shaking. He collapses to the ground and pulls his hands through his hair and tries not to hyperventilate.  
I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe, he repeats to himself in his head. Above him, the woman is looking down and staring.  
“Who are you?” She asks him. It’s difficult for him to hear her emotions. Is she horrified? Is she disgusted? Is she curious? He doesn’t know. She’s staring at him, he can feel her eyes, and once he’s got a hold of himself again, he hauls himself to his feet and avoids looking at her face.  
“Just get me to America,” he growls.


	2. Chapter 2

“Okay, the deal is this,” the woman says. She’s crossing her arms over her chest and looking at him sternly. “I pay for your ride into America and I help you get away from whoever’s chasing you. To repay me for my kindness, you convince Steve Rogers that you’re his lost Sergeant Barnes and once I collect the reward money from him, you can scram, alright?” Natalia says. The Winter Soldier isn’t sure what to think.  
“Wait, what?” He says. “I gotta convince someone I’m this Sergeant guy you were talking about?” The woman makes a face and shrugs.  
“That’s the price of the ticket, buddy,” she says.  
“You said you just need someone to fake being him,” the Soldier says and her eyes turn into slits.  
“Yeah, fake it and fake it well,” she says. Then, she relaxes a little and offers him that sly half smile again. “But don’t worry. We’ll clean you up, make you look the part. I’ll teach you what to say. With that jawline, it’ll be easy.”  
“Jawline?” The Winter Soldier says. He still feels lost. He’s not sure what happened to his escape plan.  
“You look like him, mister,” the woman says. “Believe me, I would know. I thought we’ve been over this.”  
“I don’t even know your name,” he says and the woman straightens a little and smiles.  
“Natalia Romanova,” she says and mocks a curtsy. In her filthy clothes, it’s almost comical. “And you are?”   
The Winter Soldier looks away. Natalia waits for him to speak and when it becomes obvious that he’s not going to, she lets out a frustrated breath and turns.  
“Fine, be that way,” she says. “You don’t need another name, anyway. From here on out, you’re Bucky.”  
“Who do I have to convince?” The Winter Soldier demands and Natalia raises an eyebrow at him.  
“The name ‘Steve Rogers’ doesn’t ring a bell?” She asks and he shakes his head. Natalia makes another face. “Geez,” she says. “Captain America? The American Avenger?”  
“I said I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the Winter Soldier says.  
“Do you live under a rock?” Natalia asks and the Winter Soldier grinds his teeth together in an attempt to keep his patience. “Then you probably don’t know the story, either, do you?”  
“Enlighten me,” he says.  
“Alright,” Natalia says and she dives into a storyteller voice. He wonders if she’s mocking his ignorance. “Once upon a time, there were two American boys who wanted to go to war. That’s Steve and Bucky. Bucky went and he died. Meanwhile, Steve stayed behind and became some sort of super government weapon, but the death of his friend devastated him.” The Soldier listens patiently to her story, watching her begin pace on the floor as she speaks. “Nearly eight years later, rumors start popping up that Bucky didn’t really die, that he’s out there alive somewhere. So naturally, Steve starts putting out for him. There’s a huge reward out for his return and everyone’s looking for this Bucky guy everywhere.” Natalia turns to him. “And that’s where we are now.”  
“You want the reward,” the Winter Soldier realizes. “You’re looking for a Bucky look-a-like so you can get the money.”  
“Exactly,” Natalia says.  
“But how do you know the real Bucky isn’t out there?” The Winter Soldier asks. “What if the rumors are right, what if he’s alive?”  
“He’s not,” Natalia says. “Trust me.” And there’s something about the way she says it that makes him not want to ask more. “So you agree to the deal?” She says and the Winter Soldier looks at her and considers.  
His plan has been ruined now. They’re looking for him already, he wouldn’t get out of St Petersburg in one piece on his own. But this new plan seems promising and he doesn’t see any other way and so he nods and shakes her hand when she offers it.  
“I’ll do it,” he says. “I can’t promise I’ll be any good.”  
“I’ll train you,” she says. “It won’t be so hard. Just fake a smile and a swagger and you’re halfway there.”  
Natalia buys him a dinner and they hide out in that broken building for the rest of the night. He keeps thinking about America. It hadn’t been his original plan, but it’s far away from Hydra and that’s all he needs. As far away from Russia as possible.  
It appears to him that Natalia is living in this building. She takes him down to the basement, where a makeshift bed is set up and an open suitcase is spilling over with belongings and he sits across the room from her and eats what she’s given him, which is curry and bread.  
He mentions it to her.  
“You live here,” he says and she looks over at him and shakes her head no.  
“Just for a few nights,” she explains. “The train leaves in the morning and when it does, we’re on it. I haven't been here long.”  
“Where do you come from, then?” He asks. “Who are you?” She glares at him.  
“Like I’d tell you,” she sneers and, somewhat intimidated, he looks back down at his empty plate, avoiding her eyes. A second passes and he hears her sigh. “Alright,” she gives in. “I was a part of the KGB. But I’m not anymore. And that’s all you need to know.”  
“Fine,” the Soldier says quietly with a shrug.  
“What about you?” Natalia asks and his eyes flicker upwards. “You haven’t told me anything about yourself.”  
“There’s not much to know,” he says.  
“Who are you running from?” Natalia asks. “Those people, the sirens. That sounded bad.” He’s silent. “No offense or anything, but you look sort of rough around the edges, what with the hair and the stubble. Did you escape from prison?”  
“No,” he says and sets his plate on the floor. This is only half true. It was a sort of prison for sure, but not the kind she’s thinking of.  
“Then what?” Natalia asks. “I don’t need to know much about you, but I have to at least know if I’m smuggling an inmate.”  
“Try runaway slave,” the Soldier says quietly and Natalia doesn’t respond for a while.  
“Alright,” she finally says. “Sure. Okay.”  
They don’t speak again for a while, and when they do, it’s only so Natalia can tell him that he’s sleeping on the floor and if he tries anything, he’s a dead man. He hasn’t planned on trying anything, whatever that even means, and he curls himself up in the corner and rests his head on the back wall and tries to close his eyes. He watches Natalia wrap herself up in blankets and they sit there for the rest of the night. He doesn’t get even a minute of restful sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

When the morning comes, he wearily watches Natalia stand and stretch and begin to pack her things away. She doesn’t ask if he has any belongings. He figures it doesn’t matter anyway, because he doesn’t.  
When she’s finished packing, he pulls himself to his feet and follows her.  
“Good morning,” she tells him as she leads him to the train station, just a few blocks down. He’s busy trying to hide his face and look inconspicuous. He doesn’t like being out in the open. He doesn’t answer her. A second of silence later, she halts and he almost runs into her and she turns and looks up at him. “If you want to pass yourself off as Bucky, you gotta be a little more friendly,” she accuses.  
“Oh no,” the Soldier grumbles. “Don’t tell me this Barnes guy is some sort of cheerful do-gooder.” Natalia shrugs, shifting her bag over her shoulder, then slips it off and hands it to him. He takes it with his left, the stronger arm, and stares at her.  
“Bucky Barnes would hold a girl’s bag for her,” Natalia says and the Winter Soldier glares.  
“Would he,” he replies dryly and Natalia just smiles at him smugly and turns back around.  
“Come on, Mr Barnes, we’re almost to the station,” she says and he follows her grumpily.  
The Winter Soldier is afraid that he’ll be caught as they make their way through the crowded station and onto their platform. Their tickets are validated and Natalia’s bag is checked and all the while, the Soldier stares diligently at his feet, tense and panicky and ready at any second to turn around and run if anyone so much as put a hand in his shoulder. He’s lucky, however, because no one does and Natalia is brilliant at pretending they’re completely normal and he still can’t believe he made it when he sits himself in their train compartment.  
“Don’t look so relieved yet,” Natalia tells him as she sits across from him. “That wasn’t the hard part.”  
“What’s the hard part?” The Soldier asks and Natalia reaches into her bag and pulls out a folder and hands it to him.  
“This,” she says. He opens it and swallows as dozens of pictures of what look like his own face stare back up at him. Natalia takes one out and holds it up. Bucky is grinning in it, like there’s something in the world to be happy about, and there’s another man there with an arm slung around his shoulder. The Winter Soldier stares. “You’re nothing like him,” Natalia says quietly and it almost sounds like an accusation and he looks up and meets her eyes again.  
“Who’s the other man?” He asks.  
“Steve Rogers,” Natalia says. “This is the guy you have to convince.” He looks back at the photo, at those happy faces, and presses his mouth together.  
“They must have really loved each other,” he comments quietly and Natalia puts the photo back. She’s look at him with those cold blue eyes now and nods.  
“It would have been hard not to love Bucky,” she tells him. “He was everyone’s friend.”  
“You sound like you knew him,” the Soldier says and Natalia looks down, her eyes softening. She puts her hands in her lap.  
“I knew him,” she finally admits. She says the words reverently, like the memory of him softens her hardness. The Winter Soldiers wonders if she’s an angry person. If she’s a bitter person.  
“And you loved him, too,” he says and Natalia nods.  
“I did,” she says.   
“Did you know Rogers?” The Winter Soldier asks and Natalia shakes her head.  
“I knew Bucky when he went to war,” she says. “I knew him just before he died.” Natalia takes in a breath and he watches her throw her anger back up around her and glare at him. “We’ve got a long train ride ahead,” she says. “All the way to the other side of Russia, and you’ve got a lot of work to do in the meantime. Read through that entire folder and memorize the facts about his life. I’ll quiz you later. And then maybe we’ll work on the smiling.”  
“The smiling?” The Soldier asks and Natalia nods. She puts her feet up on the seat next to him and slides down, relaxing.  
“You haven’t smiled once,” she says. “And that is very uncharacteristic, Mr Barnes.” The Winter Soldier swallows.  
“I’m not sure I know how,” he says and Natalia stares at him, her eyebrows furrowing.  
“What do you mean, you don’t know how?” She demands. “You just smile. Turn the corners of your mouth up. Try not to look so miserable.”  
“Alright, sorry, I’ll work on it,” he says irritatedly and she rolls her eyes.  
For the rest of the day, he reads about James Buchanan Barnes. He was a cheerful do-gooder, according to the writing in the folder, and he was a good friend. He was loyal and kind and gentle. In fact, he must have been damn near perfect. Like Natalia had said, everyone seemed to love him, especially Steve Rogers. The Winter Soldier wonders if he’ll feel bad for trying to trick him. He also wonders if he actually can trick him. Rogers knew Barnes well. He’d be able to pick out any mistakes the Soldier might make and although he feels a twinge of guilt, he sort of wishes it really was him who had been loved so deeply.  
“I don’t think I can remember all this,” The Soldier says after a few hours of reading. Natalia doesn’t answer, and when he looks up, he sees she’s fallen asleep.  
She’s pretty, he realizes. Very pretty, in fact. She’s got a graceful face and beautiful, full lips. Awkwardly, he looks away. He feels as though he’s noticed something he shouldn’t. He glances back down at the pages in his hands, where James Buchanan Barnes grins widely at a camera, and he wonders if he loved her back.


	4. Chapter 4

The train ride will take a few days to get all the way across Russia. The Winter Soldier spends a lot of time reading and rereading lists of facts about Bucky Barnes and being quizzed by Natalia until he can name the day he was born and all the names of his siblings and what his favorite color was. It’s tedious and boring and Natalia seems to be almost intentionally sharp towards him, but he doesn’t care. He’s away from Hydra and speeding every minute farther and that’s good enough for him.  
The next day, Natalia asks him about it again.  
“So,” she says. Her back is turned and she’s straightening the sheets on her lofted bunk in their shared sleeper. “Runaway slave, huh?”  
“Something like that,” the Winter Soldier responds. He’s leaning in the doorway waiting for her and she hesitates and turns around to face him.  
“What did they make you do?” She asks. He looks down and brushes hair out of his face with one gloved hand.  
“I did a lot of things,” he says vaguely.  
“Is that meant to be an acceptable answer?” Natalia says. The Winter Soldier doesn’t want to say it, but he realizes that she’s not going to let it go. She’s going to make him say.  
“I was an assassin,” he finally admits. “And a soldier.”   
Natalia doesn’t seem as phased as he thought she would and she responds almost immediately.  
“So you killed people,” she says and he looks up to meet her eye for a fraction of a second.  
“Yeah, I guess,” he says.  
“There’s no ‘I guess’ about it, mister, you either did or you didn’t,” she replies and he lets out a frustrated breath.  
“Alright, I killed people,” he says. “I killed a lot of people! Are you happy?” She looks at him and only shrugs, then turns back around and continues tucking in the corners of her sheets.  
“Enough,” she says. He’s going to turn around and leave, but she keeps talking. Her voice is deceptively devoid of emotion. “So, they told you to pull the trigger under, what? Threat of torture?”  
“Why do you care?” The Winter Soldier demands and she looks at him exasperatedly over her shoulder.  
“You’d care,” she says. “If you were me.” She turns back around. “I wanna know who I’m smuggling.” He supposes he can’t blame her. His shoulders fall and he stares at the ground.  
“Yes,” he says defeatedly. “Torture was definitely an imminent threat. I don’t want to talk about it.”  
“How long did they have you?” She asks. Her bed is finished now and she turns around and leans against the wooden stilts where the bed sits.  
“I don’t know,” he says back. “I don’t remember past a few years ago.” Her eyes become slits and he realizes she’s suspicious.  
“What do you mean?” She asks and he stares intently at the ground and shrugs noncommittally.  
“I mean my memory begins maybe seven years ago,” he says. “I don’t know anything beyond what they told me.  
“Really?” Natalia says. He grinds down on his teeth.  
“Really,” he says.  
“And what did they tell you?” She asks. He takes a breath in. He lets it out.  
“Absolutely nothing,” he whispers.  
There’s a long pause.  
“I’m sorry,” Natalia says and for once, her voice has lost it’s edge of sass. She sounds genuine. Part of him wants to thank her for her sincerity, but instead, he just crosses his arms over his chest in an effort to hug himself and turns around and leaves.  
That night, he dreams of kissing Natalia. He’s not wearing his gloves, but both of his hands are normal and they’re on her waist and she’s got her arms slung around his neck and she’s kissing him passionately. He’s not sure where they are or what they’re doing. She nuzzles her face into his neck and he thinks he hears her tell him she loves him.  
He wakes with a start in the dark. He’s stunned and his eyes are filled with tears and he doesn’t know why. He looks over at Natalia, wrapped up in her blankets with her back to him on the other bunk across the room, and then he cups his hands over his mouth and rolls over and tries to stop the tears from running down his cheeks.  
He thinks he dreamed about being Bucky Barnes. He doesn’t know why.


	5. Chapter 5

Day three on the train. They’re halfway there. He’s laying in his bunk and his arms are up behind his head and she’s dangling her feet over the edge of her bunk across from him and grilling him. The answers come pretty easily now. After all, he’s spent hours memorizing, and he closes his eyes and enjoys the rumbling of the train while he spouts them off.  
“Where were you born?” Natalia asks.  
“Brooklyn, New York,” he says.  
“Day?” She asks.  
“March tenth,” he says.  
“How many siblings?” She asks.  
“Three,” he says.  
“And their names?”  
“Rebecca, Marie and Daniel.”  
“And why do you always wear gloves?”  
The Winter Soldier opens his eyes and glares over at her.  
“That’s not a Bucky Barnes question,” he says.  
“No, it’s a _you_ question,” Natalia replies. The Soldier closes his eyes again and frowns.  
“They make a wonderful fashion statement,” he says dryly.  
“And what’s that?” Natalia asks.  
“They say, ‘don’t touch me’,” he tells her.  
“Do they, now?” Natalia says. He can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “I’m gonna guess germaphobe.”  
“Sounds like a great assumption,” the Winter Soldier replies condescendingly because he doesn’t want to have this conversation and he certainly doesn’t want to tell her the truth. Let her guess what she’ll guess. He doesn’t care.  
The train stops periodically through cities and at first, the Winter Soldier was anxious about it. He hid at every stop and spied on the boarders, but by the second day, he’d relaxed a little. He thinks Hydra must have lost him. They don’t know where he is. For the first time he can remember, he’s starting to breathe easily.  
At least, he is until there’s a knock at their compartment door in the middle of this conversation and his heart stops. He looks over at her, alarmed, and she’s already climbing down from the bunk to answer it. She notices his expression and he expects her to roll her eyes, but to his surprise, she takes pity on him.  
“Calm down,” she says gently. “I’m sure it’s nothing. Just stay here, I’ll take care of it.” He’s already pushing himself up into a sitting position and cramming himself into the corner between walls and he watches her leave the bedroom.  
He can hear the conversation.  
“Can I help you?” Natalia.  
“We’re looking for a fugitive.” A man’s voice. The Winter Soldier’s mouth dries up and he panics. “A man who looks like this. Have you seen him?”  
Already, the Soldier is looking for a place to hide. Their sleeper compartment is tiny, with a bathroom and a bedroom and a sitting area and it’s cramped and small and there are no real places to hide. He doesn’t know what to to do.  
“Oh, he’s scary-looking,” he hears Natalia comment and in any other situation, he would have resented her for the jab, but he thinks she’s trying to buy him time. She’s talking louder than the men, probably hoping he can hear. “What did he do?”  
“Sorry, ma’am, but that’s classified.”  
Is there a closet to hide in? Something to crawl under? A window he can throw himself out of? Even then he’d have better chances than with the people looking for him.  
“Well, I’d love to help you, but I’m afraid I haven’t seen anyone like him around here.”  
“We’d like to search your compartment, please. Just protocol.”  
“Protocol?? Absolutely not! Show me some ID!”  
“Here. … We have a warrant.”  
“Oooh… Well, of course, come right in. I’m sure you’ll find this compartment fugitive-free.”  
The Winter Soldier thinks he might have a heart attack right there in the bedroom. He can hear footsteps, he’s pressing himself up against the wall at the back of the room, he’s breathing hard and tears are starting to fall down his cheeks without permission. He’s shaking so hard he can hardly stand. He’s preparing to snap necks if he has to. He’s preparing to kill _himself_ if he has to.  
The footsteps grow closer with every millisecond and then the doorknob rattles and the door opens and Natalia’s standing there, looking urgent. She thrusts her hand out to him. His eyes flicker to the ground and he sees two men in suits crumpled to the ground behind her.  
“What are you waiting for??” Natalia hisses. “We haven’t got all day, Barnes! Come on!”  
The Winter Soldier reaches forward shakily and she grasps his hand and yanks him out of the room. They step over the bodies and then she’s dragging him by the wrist down the hall, breaking into a faster and faster run.  
When they reach the end of the car, Natalia yanks the door open and pulls the Soldier into the connecting hall with her. She looks at him.  
“Help me break this wall,” she orders.  
“What?” The Winter Soldier cries and she gestures to the flimsy wall in front of them.   
“We’re kicking it down!” She says. “Then, get ready to jump and roll!” Then, she raises her foot and the Soldier realizes they’re really doing this and he balls his left hand into a fist and together, they pummel into the wall.   
It’s flimsy and it’s meant to be removeable and he can hear screaming in the cars on either side of them as alerted Hydra agents tear through and then the wall falls away and he gasps to see Russian countryside rushing past them so fast he can barely register it. He can see agents running towards them through the windows in the doors and then Natalia grabs his hand and looks into his face and screams, “JUMP!”


	6. Chapter 6

They leap into the air together and the Winter Soldier grips Natalia’s hand tightly as the wind catches them and throws them to the ground. He has to let go as soon as he hits the dirt and instinct reminds him to tuck his head and then he’s rolling along the ground, bumping painfully. Every time his ankle hits the ground, he wants to scream in pain.  
When they finally slow to a stop at the bottom of a trench, he lays back and groans. The train rattles along behind them, speeding away, and he can’t hear anything above the roar. He can see Natalia a few yards away, pulling herself up and rubbing her backside. Once the train passes completely, she stumbles over to him. He’s gripping his ankle and wincing and he looks up at her.  
“Those people,” she says.  
“They’re called Hydra,” the Winter Soldier replies through clenched teeth.   
“They seem lovely,” she replies sarcastically, then bends to her knees to sit with him. His hands are wrapped around his ankle and she places hers on top of his and looks at him. “Let me see,” she instructs and he cautiously pulls his hands away from his ankle.  
He drops back onto his back and stares at the sky while she pulls off his boot and rolls up his pant leg. He balls his hands into fists to try and ignore the pain.  
“Does this hurt?” She asks and turns his foot and he winces.  
“It all hurts,” he says and she lets out a short breath.  
“It might be broken,” she says. “Come on, let’s find you a hospital.” He looks over at her, afraid.  
“They’ll find me,” he breathes.  
“I won’t let them take you,” she replies and she’s scooting herself up to his face. “I promise. We’ll just get you patched up and we’ll find another way to get to America.”  
He lets her slip her arm underneath him and help haul him up. When he stands, she’s there for him to lean against.  
“Do you even know where we are?” He asks and she frowns.  
“Don’t worry about it,” she says.  
“Those agents in there,” he continues. “What did you do to them?”  
“They’ll wake up in a few hours,” she replies. “Pressure points.”  
“Was that part of your KGB training?” He asks and she glares up at him.   
“You sure are chatty all of a sudden,” she says sharply and he falls silent.  
He lets her lead him, limping, along the train tracks. He knows that this way, they’ll find a station eventually, but he’s not sure how long it’ll take or who will be waiting there for them. They walk along in silence for a long time and Natalia speaks maybe a half hour into their walk.  
“This seems like as good a time as any to work on your Bucky impression,” she says and the Soldier looks at her incredulously.  
“Are you kidding?” He asks. “My ankle is broken.”  
“What would Bucky do?” Natalia challenges and the Winter Soldier rolls his eyes.  
“Let me guess,” he says. “He’d valiantly not complain, right? And then he’d probably figure out world peace and save some kittens from trees for fun. All while limping around like a poor, wounded martyr. Am I right?”  
Natalia’s fingers around his waist tighten.  
“Are you making fun of the dead?” She asks.  
“No, I’m just making an observation,” the Soldier says. “When did you say this guy was gonna be sainted again?”  
“The sass on you!” Natalia cries and he thinks for a second that she’s genuinely offended, but she laughs. “Alright, I’ll admit,” she says and she’s still smiling. “I might be a little bit biased about him. But he was a good man, he really was.”  
The Winter Soldier isn’t sure how to respond at this point. He’s never made her laugh before. When his silence becomes evident, Natalia looks up at him and her smile falls a little.  
“What?” She says and he shrugs, frowning. “Oh, come on,” Natalia says and she nudges him just gently enough to let him keep his balance while moving him over a little. “Lets see a smile. Just a little one.” The Soldier looks at the ground. “For me?”  
Her smile reminds him of the dream he’d had of her and Bucky. He feels guilty about it. He isn’t supposed to think like that. It’s only a dream, it isn’t real, but he feels as though he’s intruded on a part of her life that he was only supposed to hear about. He thinks he isn’t allowed to be her friend.  
He looks over and she’s still staring at him, waiting patiently for him to smile at her and so he musters something of a small smile, one corner of his mouth turning up in just the slightest. It doesn’t reach his eyes. It doesn’t even come close.  
“That’s the saddest smile I’ve ever seen,” Natalia says.  
“Don’t tell me to smile like Bucky,” he says, because he knows she will.  
“Can you?” She asks him. Her smile is gone now, she’s looking at him seriously. “Can you try?” He looks at her.  
“He had something happy to smile about,” he tells her. “What am I supposed to smile about?”  
Natalia looks down and thinks. When she looks back up, she grins at him.  
“I could tickle you,” she threatens playfully and his eyes widen.  
“Don’t,” he warns but her smile only spreads further and he watches her eyes flicker from his face to his stomach and back again.  
“Are you ticklish?” She asks and he almost smiles a little. The thought of tickling hadn’t crossed his mind in years. No one had ever wanted to make him laugh before.  
“Are _you_?” He threatens back and then her free hand comes out of nowhere to attack his chest and he gasps and draws back, but before he knows it, he’s actually laughing. “No, no!” He fights her as best he can, trying to wriggle away, but she’s got her arms around him and is tickling his sides now and he thinks he might fall, but he can’t remember ever having laughed this hard.  
He’s finally grinning, finally laughing, but Natalia looks at him and her smile slips right off her face. He begins to get worried.  
“What?” He says.  
“It’s your eyes,” she says and looks forward, moving her hands off of him and slipping her arm back around his waist to steady him, like she’s going to walk again. “No matter how much I make you smile, you’ll never have his eyes.”  
The Winter Soldier is quiet for a minute and his face falls.  
“What is it?” He asks her after a while. “The color? The shape?”  
“The light,” she whispers and her voice cracks like saying it had broken her heart and it certainly pierces the Soldier right through and so he swallows and stares at the ground, at his one dragging foot, and tries to forget about smiling.


	7. Chapter 7

Natalia hates him. She decided it the second she realized how much he looked like James. He has his face, his shoulders, his thin, waspish waist. Looking at him breaks her heart and it’s all she can do not to throw her arms around him and beg him to actually be James, beg him to come back to her.  
She thought she was over him. It’d almost been a decade and she’d certainly had lovers since, but seeing this man brought everything back to her in an instant. The love, the kisses, the pain, the loss. All of it.  
And certainly, she’d considered that it might be him. After all, he has no memory and he looks so remarkably like her lost James, but she stopped her hope in it’s tracks. James is dead. There’s no getting around that. And she isn’t going to let some stupid man with his stupid face and his beautiful stupid lips break her heart again eight years later.  
And there’s more too, because this man has been through things in his lifetime. He’s done things, seen things, and Natalia can tell even just by the heaviness in his shoulders and the emptiness in his eyes that it had broken him inside. There was a point in this man’s life where he’d had the very soul beaten out of his body and she could not believe that this might be her sweet, perfect James. She’d rather James be dead than be _him_. Death was a kinder fate than whatever details lie in this man’s past.  
Hours later, she brought him, in pain and hobbling, to the station. His ankle was swollen and red and she could tell he was trying not to look at it when she finally sat him down on the train station bench.  
“I’ll get us another train,” she tells him. “I’ll get us a doctor.”  
“No, not another train,” the man begs. “They’ll be there. They’ll be there, they’ll find me.”  
“They won’t,” Natalia says. “I took care of you the first time, didn’t I?” He doesn’t answer. He does that a lot. She wonders what he thinks when he falls silent, wonders what he sees when he avoids her eyes. But she doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to know. “Well, fine, how do you propose we get to the airport? I have specific tickets for the one in Magadan.” He lets out a shaky breath through his nose and shakes his head, but he still doesn’t answer.  
Natalia stands from where she’d been kneeling and holding his foot.  
“We’re taking the train,” she says sternly. “And you’re gonna keep your trap shut about it.” He looks up at her and he looks like he did when she first found him in St Petersburg, horrified and all fear. But she doesn’t know what else to do, so she keeps her stern face on and marches over to the ticket office. When she returns, he’s leaning his head against the wall wearily. His dead eyes follow her as she sits back down next to him. After a while, he speaks.  
“What do you even need with the reward money anyway?” He asks.   
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Natalia responds and he looks at her.   
“I’m serious,” he says and she avoids looking down to see her clothes. She doesn’t own many nice things, surely he’s noticed. She dresses worse than he does, which is saying something, because he really does look like he’s escaped prison. They haven’t talked about it, but he only owns one outfit, which is a pair of cloth pants and a shirt. Natalia’s got one dress. One. And it’s falling apart. She would have bought herself more, but she used every last penny to buy those tickets to America. At least he’s got a jacket to pull over himself and those leather gloves, which are perpetually on his being. She thinks there must be something strange about his hands, maybe birthmarks or scars, because she’s never seen them even once and he didn’t seem eager to tell her when she asked.  
But, one dress or not, that’s not the only reason she needs the money. He doesn’t need to know, though. That’s not part of their deal.  
“Everyone needs money, Barnes,” she says.  
She hates giving him James’ name. But he won’t give her any other and logic tells her it’s for the best if he’s going to get used to it. Her heart screams at her, though. It screams and screams and screams.   
She swallows back the pain.  
“Fair enough,” he says quietly.


	8. Chapter 8

There’s a medic on the train who looks at the Winter Soldier’s ankle once they board an hour or so later. He isn’t comfortable being left alone with a stranger and lying on tables with people standing over brings back bad memories, so he makes Natalia stay in with him. She’s leaning against the wall and crossing her arms, and she looks irritated, but that’s not unusual. He’s busy biting back the panic and the pain while cold fingers prod at his swollen ankle.  
“There’s a minor fracture,” the doctor says and he rewraps the Soldier’s ankle tightly. “Just try to stay off it, and if it gets any worse within a week or so, go to the hospital.”  
He pulls himself off the table as soon as the doctor is finished and mutters a thank you and bursts out, hobbling as fast as he can back to their new compartment.  
“Hey, slow down,” Natalia says and she hurries after him. She slips her arm in his and forces him to walk slower. “I gotta deliver you unharmed, you know.” He doesn’t answer and he doesn’t relax either until the door to the compartment is shut behind them and he collapses onto a chair.  
“I don’t want to be here,” he says, looking up at her. She rolls her eyes.  
“I basically walked you across Russia,” she says. “You think that was a picnic? You should be thanking me.”  
“Thanks for putting me right back where they’ll all find me again,” he says and he know’s he’s being accusatory and probably unnecessarily rude, but he’s exhausted and afraid and in pain and he’s falling apart.  
“You’re welcome!” Natalia says.  
“This isn’t a joke!!” He cries and Natalia sucks in a breath so her whole chest inflates and she glares at him harder than she ever has before.  
“You’re unbelievable,” she cries. “I’m doing everything I can!”  
“ _I’m_ unbelievable?” The Winter Soldier responds. “You’re trying to make a quick buck off your dead lover.”  
“He was not my lover,” Natalia replies angrily. “And it’s not like that. He’d want me to have this money.”  
“Yeah, I’m sure,” the Winter Soldier says. “How do you sleep at night?”  
“I’ll be sleeping comfortably, thank you!” Natalia says.   
“On the piles of Steve Rogers’ money?” The Winter Soldier shoots back and she raises her hand and he thinks for a minute that she might hit him and he flinches _hard_. The anger drains from her face and they both freeze and she stares at him.  
“What was that?” She gasps.  
“What?” The Soldier mumbles, staring down, now mortified, gripping the edges of his chair. Just pretend it didn’t happen, he begs her in his mind.  
“You thought I was going to hit you??” She says incredulously.  
“No,” he says.  
“You jumped a foot into the air!” Natalia cries. He looks up and then back down. “No, hey, stop that, look at me.” He raises his eyes slowly and reluctantly to her face again to see she’s still staring. She studies his face. He thinks she’s realizing the results of everything Hydra did to him and she swallows loudly. He feels vulnerable. He wishes she’d stop looking at him like that, like everything anyone had ever done to misuse him was laid out bare in front of her. He can’t help feeling overwhelmingly ashamed. “I’m not gonna hit you,” she tells him gently.   
He leans over his knees and puts his face into his hands and refuses to talk for the rest of the night.


	9. Chapter 9

They’re going through Bucky Barnes rehearsal for the hundredth time and the Winter Soldier is ready to bash his head into the wall.  
“Pretend I’m Steve Rogers,” Natalia says. “What do you say?”  
The Soldier rolls over on his bunk until he’s lying on his face and groans into the mattress.  
“Watch out,” he says weakly. “The redhead’s trying to steal your money and I’m a fake.”  
“Don’t make me come up there,” she threatens, but she’s said that several times and he knows it’s an empty threat. He doesn’t go into his monologue, though, the one he’s supposed to give Rogers.  
“Is that what Steve Rogers would say?” He asks.  
“You think you’re clever, don’t you?” She says and he looks over at her and smirks. “A real wise guy.”  
“That’s me,” he says half-heartedly.  
“Look, just give me the monologue one more time and then you can be done,” Natalia says. Then, “remember who’s keeping you away from those snake people.”  
“Hydra?” The Soldier says.  
“Whatever,” Natalia says. And the Winter Soldier takes a deep breath and starts again.  
“I was injured in battle during the war,” he says in a monotone. “And I had to hide in enemy territory. I’m back now because I was able to escape and Romanova brought me back to you.” This is the part he hates. The rest is a lie, sure, but Natalia wants him to continue and try to convince Steve he’s his friend. The Winter Soldier has done a lot of horrible things, but this seems almost cruel. He may be an assassin, a murderer, but he’s not cruel. “I, uh, I hope we can still be friends. I’ve missed you and-” He stops. He’s supposed to tell the imaginary Steve Rogers that he loves him, but he’s said it a million times today and it’s starting to lose it’s meaning and that scares him.  
He wants to really tell someone he loves them one day. He wants someone to say it back. He wants to mean it.  
“Go on,” Natalia prompts him, and instead, he rolls over so she can’t see his face. He’s silent.  
They sit there for a few minutes and finally, Natalia gives up.  
“Fine,” she says quietly. “You’re done for today.” Then, “When we get into America, there’s a museum exhibit you ought to see about him. You’re gonna have to memorize things about Rogers, too.” The Winter Soldier remains silent and she leaves the room and he lays there in his bed until the evening.


	10. Chapter 10

That night, he gets out of bed and can’t find Natalia in the compartment. He thinks she might have gone down to the dining car, which she does at meal times to bring him something back because he’s too afraid to leave their room, and figures that this would be a good time to take a shower.  
He limps into the bathroom and strips, folding up his clothes because he’ll need them later and trying not to look too hard into the mirror. His entire left arm is metal, up into his shoulder. He doesn’t remember having lost his arm. He doesn’t remember having the new one grafted on. All he knows is that it’s there, and there’s a big red brand on his shoulder that marks him as _theirs_. He has plans on removing that once he gets to America, but until then, he’s keeping his oddities a secret from Natalia. He’s hiding his arm. She doesn’t need to know.  
He takes his shower and he shuts off the water and he’s starting to pull down his towel when the door opens behind him. He whirls around just as Natalia is slamming the shower door shut.  
“What was _that_?!” He hears her cry and he feels something fall apart inside him.  
So much for hiding his arm.  
“Um, my ass?” He replies angrily. He knows she’s talking about his arm. He just doesn’t want her to say anything, doesn’t want her to acknowledge it. He’s done such a good job of hiding it so far. “Why are you coming in here??”  
“You know what I’m talking about!” She yells. “Don’t avoid it! What was that?!” He doesn’t want to come out and face her, so he sits down on the shower floor in the cold water, dropping his towel, and hugs himself.  
“None of your business!” He calls back.  
There’s a long pause and he figures she’s still there and he sits there on the ground and looks at his hand. It shines in the light and the water beads and runs off it, rolling through the seams between the plates of metal.   
“Was that what I thought it was?” He hears Natalia after a while, her voice quieter. “Was that your arm?”  
“Yeah,” he replies weakly. “Yeah, it was.”  
“That’s why you always wore gloves,” she says. He can hear it dawning on her. He doesn’t respond. “And is it, uh, attached to you?” She asks. The Soldier stares down at his hand and swallows, then he stands up. He wraps his towel around his waist tightly and opens the bathroom door. She’s sitting there and she stands when she sees him, looking uncomfortable. He bites his lip and steps back and he can feel her eyes slide across his skin. He hates it and he realizes that he didn’t have to show her, but it was easier this way. Less questions this way. And maybe after she had finished staring at it, she’d never mention it again.   
A second passes and she steps into the bathroom after him, letting the clouds of steam envelop her. Its hot, but he’s getting goosebumps. He doesn’t know what to do. The last time someone invaded his boundaries like this, they’d done it in order to hurt him and dehumanize him and humiliate him. He feels vulnerable.  
But Natalia doesn’t hurt him, even though he’s backed up so far his back hits the wall. She reaches down and takes his hand and he lets her cautiously. She holds up his fingers and examines them, turning his hand around and following the lines. Her fingers move up his forearm and his elbow and he watches them linger on his artificial bicep, where the plates warp just enough to look like a human arm, to match his other side. He doesn’t know what she’s doing. He looks at her face and wishes he could read the expression there, but it’s painfully blank. Then, suddenly, he can feel her fingers again and he looks down and realizes that she’s tracing now the line where the metal fuses with his body, there where scars and skin pucker, and he sucks in a breath. Natalia pulls her hand back and looks up at his face.  
“Sorry,” she breathes quietly. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He says nothing. “It’s a very beautiful replacement,” she continues. He thinks he should thank her for the compliment, but he doesn’t know if he can.  
She’s staring up at his face now and it’s not the first time he notices that she’s beautiful. She has rosy skin and the most beautiful mouth he’s ever seen and suddenly, in the heat of the steam swirling around their faces, she looks perfect. He’s not sure what’s gotten into him.  
“It’s not beautiful,” he says in a whisper. “It’s not like you.” His voice catches. He can’t believe he’s said this and he curses himself. But a smile curls around her face, a genuine one, and it takes his breath away.  
He thinks she might kiss him.  
Instead, she breaks their eye contact and backs up, then turns and leaves the room. He’s left alone in the steam and he looks down and sighs.


	11. Chapter 11

He dreams again of the things he’s learned about Bucky Barnes. He thinks it’s maybe because he can’t forget what happened in the bathroom, the gentle way she’d touched him and how much he’d wanted her to stay and he feels nauseous.  
He dreams of waking up next to her in the morning and laughing with her because her hair is in his mouth and her legs are tangled in the sheets, but neither of them care. The Winter Soldier could almost call it a memory because it’s so crisp and clear in his mind when he wakes. He remembers her kissing his cheek, and the smell of her skin. He remembers feeling happy, but now, awake, he only feels guilty for having imagined these things in the first place. He is an intruder in imagined scenes of Natalia Romanova’s happiness and he wishes for half a second that he could be happy too.  
He wishes that he could be happy with her.  
He rolls over in his bunk and looks at her in hers. She’s slowly waking up, but not like she had in his dream. She’s yawning and she doesn’t look happy. She doesn’t look over at him and smile like sunshine.  
“Natalia,” he says to her quietly and she sighs exhaustedly.  
“What,” she says.  
“What happened to Bucky Barnes?” He asks and then she’s looking at him and her face is unreadable. “What _really_ happened to him?”  
She sits up a little on her elbows and frowns down at her pillow.  
“He fell off a cliff,” she says.   
“You were with him?” He asks and she nods and swallows audibly.  
“I was on the enemy side,” she whispers. “But I fell in love with him. I would have followed him anywhere.” When she looks up and over and the Soldier, the meager light from their small window illuminates her, the rising of the sun behind a curtain making her skin glow. “I would have loved him forever.”  
“Did you look for his body?” The Soldier asks and she nods and then turns her face away. He watches her wipe her eyes with her hands where he can’t quite see her do it.  
“I looked for him for a long time,” she says. “If I’d had the money, I would have been the one putting up a reward.”  
Part of the Winter Soldier resents Bucky Barnes. He’s loved by everyone, so loved in fact that people cry about him years after his death and offer to pay money if anyone could possibly bring him home. The Soldier can hardly _imagine_ that much love. He’s envious.  
I’m alive! He thinks. I’m the one living! And this dead man has more love in one person than I’ve had my whole life! He can’t even appreciate it anymore and he still has more than me.  
“I feel as though I’m haunted by him,” the Winter Soldier whispers and he doesn’t mean for Natalia to hear, but he knows she does because she responds.  
“Me too,” she says.


	12. Chapter 12

The Winter Soldier is trying to learn how to bring light into his eyes. He’s shut himself in the bathroom and clipped photos of Bucky Barnes onto the mirror and he stares at his own face. Natalia is right to say they could be brothers. The Soldier has a striking likeness.  
He attempts a few small smiles, and then tells himself to think of something happy and smiles big. Again, Natalia’s right. He doesn’t look happy.  
But he _does_ look like Barnes and the Soldier can’t stop thinking about that. His eyes go back and forth from the photos to his own face, and he turns his head from side to side, examining. It’s almost uncanny. Then, pieces come together in his mind and he gasps, staring at himself. Barnes disappeared around the same time the Winter Soldier’s memories began. Surely that isn’t a coincidence. And they have the same face, after all.  
What if… He can hardly think the words. What if the Winter Soldier _is_ Bucky Barnes?  
He didn’t have to wonder why he hadn’t considered it before. Natalia had seemed so sure, so positive that he wasn’t, and he didn’t question her. And Barnes was the exact opposite of everything the Soldier was, things like happy and gentle and loved. It seems like an obvious idea now, but before, the Winter Soldier hadn’t thought it was an option.  
What if Bucky Barnes survived that fall? What if Hydra found him? What if he hit his head, lost his memories, and spent the next eight years being whipped into the kind of person Hydra wanted him to be? Would he turn out like the Winter Soldier?  
Could the Soldier have been looking into the face of Bucky Barnes all along?  
He stares at himself more. He imagines all the things he knows about Bucky Barnes, the dates and the names and the ideas. He tries to apply it to himself.  
“ _My_ birthday is March tenth,” he whispers as he looks into his own eyes. “ _My_ family lived in New York. _My_ best friend was Steve Rogers.”  
He’s never had this sort of context before. He’s never had a life, a name, a history. He finds it strange to settle into, like trying on an old pair of shoes that don’t fit anymore. He still sort of thinks of Barnes as a person separate from himself.  
“All that love,” he realizes. “All those people who miss him. They could be missing _me_.”  
The Winter Soldier thinks that this is the most unbelievable part of the whole idea.  
He also decides that he won’t share this idea with Natalia. Not just yet.


	13. Chapter 13

They finish out the train ride with more Bucky training and the Winter Soldier begins to question Natalia's knowledge.  
“Bucky wouldn’t look down like that,” Natalia scolds him for avoiding eye contact for the millionth time since they met each other. “Bucky would hold his head up and keep eye contact with the people he’s talking to.”  
“What if he didn’t want to?” The Winter Soldier grumps and this is the first time he’s defied her like this and she doesn’t seem to know how to respond. “What if it’s been eight years and he just has problems with eye contact lately?”  
“Well, I-” Natalia says and stops herself. Then, she scowls at him. “You think you know more about Bucky Barnes than I do?” She asks. He shrugs nonchalantly.  
“I was just saying,” he says. “What if.”  
And later that day, he’s slurping the soup she brought him loudly and reclining in his seat lazily.  
“Bucky would sit up and eat like a gentleman,” Natalia says and he looks over at her and can’t help but smirk a little.  
“Maybe Bucky just broke his ankle and he’d really rather relax,” he says and Natalia glares.  
Then again, a few hours later.  
“You’re never gonna convince Rogers that way,” Natalia says. She sounds angry. He looks over at her and he’s not even sure what he’s done wrong this time. “You’re certainly not convincing me.”  
“Maybe Bucky’s just changed, Natalia,” the Winter Soldier cries and throws his hands in the air. “Maybe it’s been almost a decade and things have happened to him and he just became a different person!” Natalia doesn’t answer immediately and that’s how he knows he’s set something off. Instead, she stares at him and studies his face. He looks back uncomfortably, waiting for her to respond.  
“Well,” he finally says weakly. “It’s a possibility.”  
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I guess so.” But the way she agrees with him is more like she’s accusing him of something and he sinks back into his seat and glares at the ground.  
By the evening, Natalia has quit talking about Bucky, so the Soldier starts talking about him instead. She’s sitting in the seat across from him, flipping through a magazine with a bored expression on her face, when he says, “What do you think Bucky would do right now?” Her eyes flicker up to him, staring at him through her eyelashes and her eyebrows sink in suspicion.  
“What do you mean?” She asks slowly and he looks at her and bites the corner of his lip.  
“Well,” he says. “You’re so sure he’s a gentleman. Maybe he’d try to strike up friendly conversation.” She keeps her eyes on his.  
“Maybe he would,” she agrees. “What would he want to talk about?” The Winter Soldier shrugs.  
“Maybe he’d want to talk about you,” he says and her face changes.  
“Me?” She exclaims.  
“Maybe he’d want to tell you that you’re very lovely,” he says shyly. “And that he’s sorry he’s such a mess.”  
There’s a long silence and the Winter Soldier imagines he can hear his own heart beating.  
“Are you making a move on me?” Natalia asks, putting her magazine down.  
“Depends,” the Winter Soldier says and grins a little. “Is it working?”  
A minute ago, Natalia looked irked, but now she’s trying to suppress a smile. She rolls her eyes and when she lets out a breath, her face breaks into a grin.  
“Stop making me laugh,” she says.  
“Maybe Bucky would tell you that you have a pretty laugh,” the Soldier says and when she looks over and makes eye contact with him, he shrugs overdramatically. “But I guess we’ll never know.”  
“What would _you_ do?” Natalia asks him and he offers her a hopeful smile.  
“Me?” He says. “I would definitely tell you that you have a pretty laugh. And I would tell you I’ve only heard it once and I’m sorry you can’t be happy more.”  
Natalia stares into his eyes and he watches her suck her bottom lip in. She’s leaning towards him and he takes the cue and leans closer, but right when he thinks she might reach up and touch him, she looks away and stands up.  
“We get into Magadan tomorrow,” she says loudly. “It’ll be a long day. I’m going to bed.”  
He watches her leave and shut the door behind her and he sits in the compartment alone wondering what he did wrong.


	14. Chapter 14

They get off the train at Magadan and the Winter Soldier considers himself lucky to not have been attacked more than once. He’s almost sure that he will be as he’s getting on the plane, however, and he steals a hat inconspicuously as they walk through the airport to hide his face. When Natalia turns around, she notices it.  
“Where did you get that?” She demands and he looks up over her head and shrugs, muttering a vague answer. She stares at him and then rolls her eyes.  
“Alright,” she says. “But if someone calls you out for stealing, it’s your problem.”  
“I’d rather have to explain myself to a police officer than be noticed by a Hydra agent,” he tells her and he’s not kidding and she looks back up at him to gauge his expression.  
“Yeah,” she finally says thoughtfully. “I guess you would.”  
Luckily, everything goes off without a hitch and they board the plane and the Winter Soldier looks out the window and watches Russia disappear.  
“Think you’ll miss it?” He asks Natalia and she looks over.  
“Miss what?” She asks and he motions to the window.  
“Russia,” he says. “It’s your home.”  
“No.” She shakes her head. “America will be better. For the both of us.”  
“I guess,” he says and looks back out the window. Then he turns back and says, “But after you pick up the money, you won’t ever see me again.” She looks at him.  
“I guess so,” she says. “You could find me.”  
“I could,” he says, and then after a minute, she sighs and looks down.  
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t find me.”  
“What?” The Soldier exclaims. “Why?”  
“You don’t want to go where I’m going,” she says vaguely and he doesn’t know what she means, but when he starts to ask her where she’s going, she silences him by reaching up and taking a piece of his hair in her fingers. He’s so surprised he quiets and watches her study the strands, waiting for her to look up into his eyes.  
“We’ll need to get you a haircut,” she finally says sharply and drops her hand and looks away. “Bucky Barnes wouldn’t look like he just crawled off the street.”  
“Well maybe he _did_ ,” the Soldier grumbles and looks away huffily. He doesn’t see the look she tosses back to him over her shoulder with soft eyes while he’s glaring out the window at the clouds.


	15. Chapter 15

America is a completely different experience than Russia, the Winter Soldier finds. Everything is new and all the buildings are designed differently. It seems to him as though there is no history here at all.  
But there’s no Hydra here either, and so he doesn’t care. He’s safe, at least for now, and his Bucky impression is coming along nicely enough to pay off his end of his and Natalia’s bargain, so he’s beginning to think that life is really looking up.  
“Rogers lives in DC,” Natalia says and she shows him on a map as they walk out of the airplane and into LAX. “It’s all the way across this country, so we’ll take another plane.”  
During the several hour layover they have to wait, Natalia finds a hairdresser nearby and she drags him out of the airport and takes him there.  
“We’ll get you new clothes,” she says. “Dress you up.”  
He wonders if it’s hurting her, molding the Winter Soldier into someone she watched die. Someone she still loves. If it is, she hides it well.  
He’s never been so pampered as he is at the barber shop, where the hairdresser washes his hair and shaves his face for him. It’s a new experience and he’s a little thrown, but Natalia’s just a few feet away, watching to make sure everything goes according to plan, and when he grins delightedly at her, she smiles a little back weakly. He then remembers that he has Bucky Barnes’ face and none of his light and he stops smiling.  
Natalia shows the hairdresser a photo of Bucky with his clean cut, short hairstyle and asks him to do the same on the Winter Soldier. He watches in the mirror as more of Barnes’ face appears in his, especially now that his face is clean and his hair is cropped. When the hairdresser is finished, he runs his hand through it and stares.  
 _My_ birthday is March tenth, he thinks. _I_ was born in New York. _I’m_ Bucky Barnes.  
“What do you think?” Natalia asks, coming up behind him, and her voice is hollow. He glances down at her in the mirror. It is hurting her, he realizes. She’s in a lot of pain.  
“It’s fine,” he says.  
“It looks better on you,” she replies and pays the dresser and as they walk out, she keeps talking. “We have to find you new clothes now,” she adds. “A nicer pair of gloves. You’ll have to come up with another story about why you can’t show Rogers your hands.”  
“Do you want to do it now?” The Soldier asks, looking down at her, concerned. “I mean, we can take a break. If you want to.”  
“Do you want to?” She asks, her voice empty.  
“No,” he says miserably and she glares up at him.  
“Then why would you think _I_ want to?” Natalia demands. “I’m fine. We keep going.”  
And keep going they do. She takes him to a suit shop and they tailor him a pretty suit in grey and he looks at himself in the mirror and thinks he’s never seen himself so handsome.   
“We could get you a dress, you know,” he mentions to her as the tailor takes pins out of his sleeves. “You could get your hair cut, too.”  
“I’m not made out of money, Barnes,” she says and he frowns at her.  
“Are you sure?” He says. “It might make you happy.” She looks at the ground.  
“And why would that matter?” She asks. The tailor turns him and he has to look at Natalia over his shoulder.   
“You deserve to be happy,” he says and Natalia just stares at him.  
They buy him a few more outfits off of hangers and he puts them into a carry on bag for the next plane they’re taking and on the way out of the store, while the manager’s back is turned, he slips a dress into the bag as well and runs out before he can trip the alarms.  
An hour or so later, as they’re boarding the plane, Natalia says, “that’s a terrible habit you have.”  
“What do you mean?” He says.  
“You’re a pathological thief,” she says, but she says it to him with a teasing smile thrown over her shoulder. “And that dress probably wasn’t even my size.”  
“It’s the thought that counts,” he tells her.  
“You’re a romantic,” she laughs, but he watches her sober quickly. “He was, too.”


	16. Chapter 16

They reach DC by the evening and take a cheap hotel near the airport. When they get there, Natalia has a hard time trying to disguise her excitement as she rummages through his bag and pulls out the stolen dress.  
“You’re a thief, she says,” the Winter Soldier mumbles teasingly just loud enough for her to hear as she holds it up to herself in the mirror. He leans against the wall by the mirror and shoves his hands in the pockets of his new pants. “Probably doesn’t even fit me, she says.”  
“Oh, hush,” Natalia says and admires it in the mirror, unable to hold back her smile. It’s a teal green summer dress that ends just above her knees and she runs her hand down the front and swishes the skirt. “I’ll thank you when you start _paying_ for my presents.”  
“As soon as I can,” he tells her and she looks over at him and they lock eyes. “I’ll buy you lots of dresses.”  
She looks down and he thinks she blushes, but he’s not sure.  
She ducks into the bathroom and whens she comes out, she’s twirling in that green dress, letting the skirt dance around her legs. Admittedly, it’s a little big on her and the waist is too wide, but the Winter Soldier doesn’t think it matters. She looks beautiful.  
“You’ll wear it when you present me to Steve Rogers?” He asks and she nods.  
“Thank you,” she says sincerely. “For thinking of me.” The Winter Soldier pushes himself off the wall and approaches her casually.  
“I thought you said you weren’t going to thank me?” He says and she gives him a half-smile. Her blue eyes twinkle.  
“I changed my mind,” she says teasingly. “Don’t make me take it back.” Then, “speaking of Rogers, how are you feeling?” She looks into his eyes again. “Do you think you’re ready?”  
A sick feeling grows in the Winter Soldier’s stomach. He hadn’t realized the time to test his knowledge had come so soon. He would either prove to be Bucky Barnes or he would screw everything up and cause everyone more pain.   
And he’d be alone again.  
“I’m not sure,” he says. “When will we go?”  
“When you’re ready,” she tells him and he looks down at the carpet.  
“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready,” he admits.  
“Hey,” Natalia says and he looks up and suddenly, her fingers are brushing his jawline. She’s so close to him he can almost feel her breath and his pulse jumps. “You’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it, you’ll do great. You’re so like him.”  
He looks at her and chuckles a little.  
“You always tell me I’m doing it wrong,” he says and he watches her eyes flicker to his mouth.  
“Well,” she says slowly. “There _is_ one final test.”  
“Is there?” He asks and he wonders if this is really going to happen. Could this really happen to him?  
Natalia stands up on her toes and presses her mouth to the Winter Soldier’s fiercely. Her hands rest on his shoulders and he puts his on her hips, like he had before when he dreamed of this. They stay there for a while, barely coming up for air, and he squeezes her closer.  
“Wow.” Natalia breathes into his lips once she pulls back and her fingers tighten on his shoulders. “You kiss like him.”  
“Natalia, maybe,” the Winter Soldier says and he thinks maybe now he can share his hopes with her. “Maybe I _am_ him.”   
He’s not prepared for the expression on Natalia’s face when he looks down at her. She looks venomous and her eyes are cold and he’s just not ready for her rejection.  
“No!” She exclaims, as though he’s suggested something extremely vile, and she shoves him. He stumbles back a little and she starts shaking her head. “No, you’re not him.”  
“But…,” the Winter Soldier says weakly. “But it makes sense.”  
“No!” Natalia cries again. “I don’t want you to be him!”  
The Winter Soldier searches her face pleadingly. He can feel his own heart breaking.  
“Why?” He whispers and Natalia’s face is turning red. Her eyes glisten with tears.  
“The things you told me,” she says and her voice is still just a little too loud, as though she’s shouting at him, as though she’s blaming him. “I don’t want-” she stops and chokes and starts over. “I can’t imagine that they happened to him!”  
The Winter Soldier feels as though the breath has been knocked out of him.   
“But it’s fine that they happened to me,” he replies and she shakes her head, wiping at her face.  
“No? Yes?” She says. “I-I just… I can’t tell myself that he became you. I can’t think that my sweet James became whatever it is you are.”  
The Winter Soldier doesn’t think he can breathe. Natalia’s not looking at him anymore, she’s got her hands over her face and she’s crying, and he brushes past her and leaves the room.


	17. Chapter 17

The next day, there’s a thick silence between the Winter Soldier and Natalia. He agrees to see Rogers that day, despite the anxiety growing in his gut, and she prepares takes him there. They run through his lines a few more times and he thinks the words all sound hollow.  
He tries all day not to think about what she’d said to him. How she’d rather he was dead at the bottom of a cliff somewhere than standing in front of her. He tries not to think about it.  
He dresses in his suit and she in her dress and he sits on the edge of the bed while she does his hair with a comb and water from the sink. It occurs to him that if everything goes right today, this will be the last time he sees her.   
Oh well, he thinks spitefully. Good riddance. But he can’t seem to put his heart into the words.  
Apparently, if you’re an Avenger, you can’t just have anyone off the street knocking on your apartment door, so Natalia doesn’t have Rogers’ address. What she _does_ have is their names on a queue and because it’s their turn, she’s able to request that they meet somewhere for dinner so Rogers can determine whether or not she’s really found his Bucky and they wait anxiously for dinnertime to come around.  
The Soldier waits for her to say something to him all day and she says nothing. He figures she must not want him buying her dresses or kissing her.  
He wonders what he did wrong.


	18. Chapter 18

Steve Rogers has seen a lot of ‘Buckys’ in the past few months. Barnes had been dead for years and he’d lost all hope of ever seeing him again, but then the rumors began to crop up, whispers he’d hear every now and again, and he lived for the day when he’d hear the next one. Bucky was spotted where? Bulgaria? No way. And before that? Puerto Rico. And before that? Uzbekistan. He doesn’t know which ones are true, if any of them are, but as they became more frequent, Steve couldn’t handle it anymore. He put out a notice and racked up a reward of everything he owned and waited, praying that he’d find his best friend.  
It had been eight years. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d find.  
But now, he’d been through months and months of turning down Bucky impersonators. He felt a new kind of grieving, one that was cropping up almost a decade after Steve thought he’d finished mourning, and it hurt. Every single appointment held the smallest sliver of hope and so far every single one had crushed him.  
One or two of the Buckys had been nearly convincing. They looked like him, talked like him, moved like him, but in the end, something always gave them away and Steve began to realize that people were chasing his money. They didn’t care about Bucky at all and no one knew where he was and he was probably actually dead and Steve was tearing open old wounds for what? Scam artists? Con men? All self-proclaimed experts on the life story of Bucky Barnes and none of them accurate enough to fool Steve Rogers.  
He’s through. He’s finished. Steve doesn’t think he can take it anymore, doesn’t think he can sit through one more meeting with someone else making a parody of his friend’s good name. He doesn’t think he can see anymore hope crushed.  
So I’ll go to this one last appointment, he decides tiredly. And I’ll turn them away. And I’ll go home and I’ll call the whole thing off.


	19. Chapter 19

That evening as they wait at the doors of the restaurant, Natalia takes a long time straightening the Winter Soldier’s tie. She keeps doing it and undoing it and making adjustments and once, she does it up too tight and he chokes and she rips it off, apologizing.  
“Maybe I just ought to do it,” he tells her awkwardly and takes the blue tie from her fingers. She nods and turns around and wraps her arms around herself.  
“Sure,” she says quietly and he ties it up and straightens it and then leaves it alone.  
They stand there for a few minutes in silence.  
“How early are we?” He asks. She refuses to look at him.  
“Just early enough,” she says and then she turns and starts to lead him into the restaurant. “We can probably call in our reservation now. Come on, let’s go.”  
It’s a nice restaurant and the Soldier wonders how much Natalia’s paying for their meal here. He sort of hopes Rogers offers to pay to ease the load on her, and then remembers he’s trying to be spiteful and forget about her and thinks he’ll order the most expensive thing on the menu.  
He knows he won’t be able to bring himself to, but it makes him feel better to at least think it.  
They wait at their table for a good ten minutes and the Soldier stares at the chair across from him and recites his lines over and over and over in his head. He realizes he’s completely lost his appetite. Maybe Natalia will have to pay for less than he thinks.  
When Steve Rogers finally enters the room, the Winter Soldier feels as though the breath has been knocked out of him. There’s something about this man’s face, about his eyes and his hair and his chest and his shoulders and the way he moves when he walks and the way his eyes shift across the room that’s entirely familiar to him. He has to remind himself to close his mouth and then Rogers sits down at the table across from him.  
When Steve Rogers looks up, almost reluctantly, the Soldier thinks, they lock eyes. Rogers blinks after a second and he can feel his eyes across his face. He wonders what he’s thinking. He hopes it’s nice thoughts. His right palm is sweating under his glove and his mouth has gone dry.  
“Captain Rogers,” Natalia says. Her Russian accent is endearing in English. He hasn’t heard it before. He tries not to commit it to memory. “This is Bucky Barnes.”   
Steve hasn’t moved his eyes off of the Winter Soldier’s face even once yet. The Winter Soldier forgets everything he was supposed to say.  
“Hi,” he whispers.  
And then Steve’s face goes hard and he looks over at Natalia angrily.  
“What did you do?” He demands. “Plastic surgery? Make up? Training?” Natalia seems flustered. She swallows and the Soldier can see her wringing a towel in her hands under the table.  
“I didn’t do anything to him,” she says.  
“You just printed out a picture of him and told the surgeon, make him look like this, right?” Steve says. The Winter Soldier wishes he could melt into his chair and disappear. Natalia’s face is going white. “What is it with you people?” He continues, fuming. “You just can’t wait to torture me, huh? Can’t wait to see my heart break one more time.”  
“Captain Rogers, I know he looks so much like James, but that’s because he is!” Natalia exclaims when she’s able to fit a word in. Steve is still enraged. He looks like he’ll jump up and leave any minute. “Please just listen to him, you’ll know!”  
Oh no. The Winter Soldier can’t breathe and all eyes are on him now.  
“Well?” Steve prods him. “What lies are you gonna try to feed me tonight?”  
Natalia looks at him encouragingly and nods.  
“Um,” the Winter Soldier says and swallows. “I-I, uh, was injured. Uh, in b-battle during the war. And, and, uh, I had to hide. In enemy territory.” He sucks in a breath and then doesn’t think he can make it through the rest. “I’mbacknowbecauseIwasabletoescapeandRomanovabroughtmebacktoyou.”  
There’s a long silence. Steve stares at him in disbelief and Natalia’s face is slowly falling and the Winter Soldier realizes that he’s disappointed everyone. This is literally the worst the meeting could have possibly gone. He’s not even sure it’s happening, it’s so horrible. He’s waiting to wake up next to Natalia on the train, praying it’s just a nightmare.  
He didn’t just screw this whole thing up. He couldn’t have. No no no no no no.  
A few more seconds pass and then Steve Rogers scoots back his chair and stands up and starts to walk out the door.


	20. Chapter 20

“Wait!!” The Winter Soldier cries and he leaps out of his chair and makes a grab for Steve, nearly tripping over the table. “Wait, wait, Steve, please! Wait!” Rogers whirls on him, furious.  
“Go back to where ever you came from,” he hisses. “You’re not Bucky and I never want to hear from either of you again.”  
“Please, we’ve come so far,” the Soldier pleads.  
“But you’re not Bucky,” Steve growls and the Soldier looks at his face and realizes that this is a man he can’t lie to. His shoulders sink and he lets out a shaking breath.  
“I don’t know who I am,” he says weakly. “You wanna know the truth, cause that’s it. My memory starts about eight years ago and I was never given a name. I’ve been living in Russia that whole time and, and look-” With this, he tears his gloves off and he hears Natalia behind him gasp. He holds both of his hands out for Steve to see. The left one glitters in the light. “I lost my arm, but I don’t know how. They replaced it for me, but they made me do horrible things with it, Steve, horrible things. I’m a bad person, Steve.” He blinks hard. He’s starting to cry. He’s getting worked up. “They kept me all that time and forced me to do things for them.”  
“They?” Steve asks and the Winter Soldier shakes. He trembles from his head to his feet.  
“They’re called Hydra,” he breathes. “And they kept me in chains. For years.” He rubs his eyes and takes a deep breath in and out. “But I didn’t want it anymore and I figured I’d rather try to be free and die than keep living like I had been because that was no life and I couldn’t do it anymore! So I ran away and Natalia found me and she said I looked like this friend of yours and she needs your money, so we came here to show you!  
“And I thought, damn I was a fool, I thought that whole time that maybe someone would love me one day! Maybe I’d found myself a better life and I could have the things this Bucky guy had, like people who love him and miss him, thinking maybe I’d been loved and missed!” He turns around and throws his hands up and looks from Natalia to Steve. “For a while, I even thought I might be Bucky! Because I have his face and my life begins where his ended, I thought maybe his love could be my love, too! I just wanted someone to love me to the end of the line and back and I don’t know if I deserve it or not but all I know is that I came all this way with Hydra on my heels and I just want to know if you can love me!”  
There is another silence. He can’t see Natalia’s face, but Steve looks stunned. The entire restaurant has gone quiet in fact, and Steve’s face is going white.  
“What did you say?” He whispers. The Winter Soldier looks at him and swallows.  
“I-I said a lot of things,” he says.  
“The part,” Steve says. “At the end.”  
“I, uh,” the Winter Soldier says. “I want to know if you can love me?”  
“Before that,” Steve says.  
“I want s-someone to love me to the end of the line?” He says and Steve reaches up with both hands to scrub his face and he keeps looking at the Soldier.  
“Where did you hear that?” Steve whispers.  
“I don’t know,” the Winter Soldier replies quietly. “I don’t remember.”  
Steve steps forward and, uncomfortable, the Winter Soldier steps back.  
“Do you remember _me_?” Steve asks and the Winter Soldier blinks fast.  
“No?” He says. “Yes? Sort of?”  
“We never told anyone else those words,” Steve says. “They were ours.”  
“After your parents died,” the Winter Soldiers says and he doesn’t know how he knows it. He just does.  
Steve’s eyes fill with tears and he reaches forward and grabs up the Soldier before he can say ‘no hugs’ and he’s holding on to him for dear life. Carefully, the Winter Soldier wraps his arms around his back gently and then realizes how nice it feels to be held. He sinks into the embrace after a few stiff seconds and rests his face on Rogers’s shoulder and starts to squeeze back.  
“I’ve missed you so much,” Steve sobs and the Soldier feels a lump grow in his throat.


	21. Chapter 21

Back at Steve’s apartment, Steve and Natalia are working out the details of the money. The Wint-Bucky. Bucky is exploring the apartment after being given permission to do so, and he’s going carefully through Steve’s displayed things. There are photo frames on windows and shelves and some of the frames have pictures of him, pictures he hasn’t even seen before, and most of them with Steve next to him. A couple, he realizes, are graphite drawings, and he picks them up to examine them closer, impressed with the skill.  
Across the apartment, he can hear the conversation.  
“I owe you everything,” Steve says sincerely. “Everything for bringing him back to me.”  
Natalia laughs awkwardly.  
“The set price will be more than enough,” she tells him.  
The Winter So-Bucky. (Think, Bucky Bucky Bucky. I’m Bucky. Me. That’s your name, so say it.) Bucky reads the titles of a few books on a shelf, but he finds he’s more interested in the conversation going on in the other room and he strains to eavesdrop.  
“Alright and,” Steve says. Bucky can hear the sounds of a pen scratching on paper. “There. That’s everything, and a little extra as a thank you.”  
“No, thank _you_ , Captain Rogers,” Natalia says.  
“Would you like to tell him goodbye?” Steve asks and Bucky’s heart jumps in his throat. There’s something of a pause before she responds.  
“Um, no,” she says. “No, I’m alright. Tell him I wish him well.”  
Bucky stares forward at the shelf of books and swallows as his heart shatters again.  
“It sounds like you two had quite the adventure together,” Steve says and footsteps are getting closer and their voices become louder and Bucky ducks behind a wall to avoid seeing them as they pass.  
If she doesn’t want to tell him goodbye, he won’t make her.  
“It really was something,” Natalia says and her laugh sounds faked and the door opens and he bids her goodbye and he hears the door shut again and he thinks his heart was left on the other side.  
You said you loved him, Bucky thinks. You said you loved _me_. I loved you, too, you know. I loved you twice.  
Steve finds him and Bucky falls into his arms. He hopes she buys herself lots of nice dresses.


	22. Chapter 22

Life with Steve is more than Bucky could have ever wanted. He gets his own bedroom right next to Steve’s and he’s allowed to sleep in all he wants. He can eat as much as he wants to and take the longest baths he can stand and if he’s ever feeling lonely or sad, Steve is willing to offer him hugs around the clock.  
They work on his memory and talk about what he went through with Hydra and Steve is excited to introduce himself to Bucky again. Bucky remembers fragments now as he and Steve talk through it. He remembers being a kid in New York and he remembers befriending Steve in the first place and he remembers going to war.  
He remembers fragments of Natalia, too. He’s come to the conclusion that the dreams he’d had weren’t imaginary and were instead actual memories of her. He remembers helping her escape the KGB and he remembers kissing her.  
One particularly bad evening, he remembers his fall from the cliff and he realizes that he now knows how he lost his arm.  
A week or so after having settled in with Steve, he’s still thinking about Natalia. Steve sits down next to him gently on the couch that afternoon and looks at him and says, “what’s up?” Bucky looks over and lets out a breath.  
“The girl who brought me here,” he admits for the first time. “I really liked her. And she wouldn’t even tell me goodbye.” Steve makes a face.  
“I’m sorry, Buck,” he says. This is another new name, a nickname. Bucky likes when Steve uses it.  
“Do you know where she might have gone?” Bucky asks, looking over. “Did she say anything?” Steve shakes his head.  
“She seemed pretty anxious to leave, so I just handed her the check and showed her out,” Steve says. “If I’d known she meant something to you, I would have gotten a number out of her at least.”  
“She was great,” Bucky says sadly. “She was beautiful. She was… She saved me, Steve.”  
“I know,” Steve says and he offers up a small smile. “I’m grateful to her, too.”  
“I’m more than just grateful,” Bucky sighs. “I loved her. I didn’t want to say goodbye.”  
Steve hugs him, which Bucky greatly appreciates, and he promises they’ll start looking.  
“After all,” Steve says and he gives Bucky a characteristic grin. “I found _you_. Finding anyone else will be a piece of cake.”


	23. Chapter 23

The notice for Natalia is out for weeks. Bucky waits impatiently as more and more memories resurface and he grows closer and closer to Steve, but Natalia is still out of the picture.   
He can still remember her hands on him and her mouth meeting his. He remembers her eyes and the way she saved him again and again. He remembers their wittier of conversations, remembers enjoying the time spent with her. He misses her.  
He’s beginning to think maybe she just hated him after their conversation in the hotel room. Maybe she really would have rathered him dead. Maybe she never loved him at all. Clearly she didn’t now, or she’d be here.  
He tries very hard to put her out of his mind.  
Ever since Bucky returned, Steve has been wanting to give him something of a welcome back ceremony. They’d had one all to themselves a few weeks ago, with a small cake and a movie night and just the two of them, but Steve wants to reconnect Bucky with _all_ of their old friends and he’s been excited about it for a while now. So Bucky finally gives in and helps him plan the ceremony. There’ll be food and music and Steve promises that he’s not much of a party person either, so they won’t invite _too_ many people and as they’re making the guest list, Bucky discretely adds Natalia’s name to the end.


	24. Chapter 24

The party isn’t too overwhelming, luckily for Bucky. He’s wearing the suit Natalia bought him and Steve’s dragging him around the apartment and introducing him to more and more people whose faces are just barely familiar and after about an hour of this, Bucky breaks away to take a breather. He snatches a plate of chips off the table in the kitchen and slinks to his bedroom and swears to himself that he’ll only be out for a minute.  
He sits on the edge of his bed and smooths his hair back with hands still perpetually gloved and before he can do anything else, a hand from behind is cupped around his mouth and several more tighten around his torso and arms and he tries to scream, but he can’t.  
He panics. The Winter Soldier thrashes and kicks as the hands pull him backwards. He can’t get any sort of leverage, he can’t claw any of the hands off of himself and before he knows it, dark figures with powerful arms are throwing a black sack over his head and carrying him out his bedroom window.  
“STEVE!!” The Soldier screams, but his cries are too muffled by the hands and the sounds of the party behind his closed door. “HELP!”  
He can’t see, but he thinks he’s being thrown into a van. He hears the doors shut and he tears the bag off his face and throws himself at the walls of the car, but it does nothing.  
It’s Hydra. He’s known that since they touched him, grabbed him, silenced him. They have him again. They’ve caught him.  
The Winter Soldier is brought to a base after hours of driving and he feels sick. His throat is hoarse from screaming. He keeps imagining all the horrible things they’ll do to him, all the ways they’ll think up to punish him for running, and his stomach heaves.  
When the car finally stops, he’s dragged kicking and screaming out of the car. He doesn’t know where he is, but the walls are grey cement and he feels that distinct chill that tells him he might be underground.  
It’s like I’ve been buried alive, he thinks to himself as they drag him down the halls. I’m already six feet under, I might as well be dead.  
He’s tied to a wall in a dark room and he’s shaking so hard he can hardly fight anymore. He’s got tears running down his face and he feels sweat bead on his skin. They strip his nice suit away before they lock the shackles, ripping off his jacket and his shirt and making him sit there in the cold half naked. They laugh to each other maliciously as they leave him there alone. He can feel his arm starting to match the temperature around him and touching his own skin sends goosebumps through his body. He tries to tell himself to breathe.  
Then, in front of him, a light turns on and the Winter Soldier looks up, blinking. When his eyes adjust he sees Natalia at the other side of the room and he gasps. She’s crumpled on the floor and the green dress he stole for her is torn and ruined and covered in dirt. Her arms and feet are tied up like his are, but she’s slumping. He notices blood and bruises on her bare skin.  
“Natalia,” he breathes hoarsely. Then, louder. “Natalia. Natalia!! Natalia!!” Her head raises weakly and she looks at him with eyes glazed.  
“James,” she mutters.  
“It’s me, it’s James,” the Winter Soldier cries. “Natalia, look at me, stay with me, Natalia!” She’s already beginning to slump again and he throws himself as hard as he can towards her, which doesn’t get him very far because the shackles bite into his wrist and he’s yanked to a stop. “Natalia, Natalia,” he pleads.  
A door on the other side of the room opens and the Winter Soldier screams. Hydra agents come through it and one is pushing a cart adorned with a variety of weapons. A chill runs through him. He recognizes this.  
But this time, the torture weaponry isn’t for him and he realizes that. Instead, they stop next to Natalia and one of the agents throws a grin over her shoulder at the Soldier.  
“Don’t hurt her,” he breathes.  
“If you loved her so much,” one of the agents says nonchalantly as they start to force Natalia to sit upright. “Why didn’t you look for her? She was supposed to be bait, you know, but you didn’t take it.”  
The Winter Soldier doesn’t know how to respond.  
“What?” He says. “I-I thought she didn’t want me. I didn’t know...”  
“Well, it doesn’t matter now,” the agent responds in that frustratingly bored voice. “We have you and now, we’ll just use her as punishment.”  
The Winter Soldier starts to work frantically on his shackles.  
“Don’t hurt her,” he pleads again. “Hurt me, kill me, cut more pieces off of me and put them back, I don’t care! Just leave her alone! She hasn’t done anything, she’s not even who you want!” The agents say nothing. One of them picks up a knife. The Winter Soldier starts to work faster. “Please, please!” He cries and now he doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore, he’s just begging them with all he has. He can feel the shackle on his left hand straining and he grinds his teeth and pulls on it harder. Come on, come on, come on, he thinks.  
Natalia’s starting to scream. They’re just torturing her, hurting her for no reason, digging in knives and taking out chunks. He can’t see her past the agent who's got his hands on her face, but he can hear her screams and he pleads louder. “Don’t hurt her, stop, do it to me, I don’t care, leave her alone, leave her alone!” He’s sobbing. Finally, the shackle on his left side splinters and he tears his hand out of it, hoping that the agents don’t notice over the sound of his screaming. They don’t turn. He starts clawing at his right hand and he bites down on his tongue and breaks his own thumb, but he’s finally able to slide his hand gingerly out of the metal ring. Then, his feet. He pulls and kicks and pries and Natalia screams and after far too long, he’s able to rip himself out of them and then he barrels at the Hydra agents.  
He’s never done this before. He’d never had enough willpower to try. But now he thinks he should have given it a shot earlier because he’s just tearing through them. They pull guns and fling knives and he dodges them all. He favors his left, but he’ll use his right too if he has to, trying to ignore the pain of his broken thumb.   
He’s brutal in his successes. One Hydra agent gets her head bashed into a wall. Another is throw back and impaled on his own torture device. Another gets a snapped neck. And the one who was cutting into Natalia? The Winter Soldier grabs him by his throat and lifts him until his feet dangle and he snarls up at him before tossing his body to the ground.  
The cell is littered in bodies and soaked in blood. Natalia’s sobbing, leaning forward in her binds, and her shackles are only rope, so he rips them and she collapses. He scoops her up and falls back down onto the ground with her, wrapping his arms around her and cradling her. He brushes some of her hair back off her skin and examines what they’ve done as he rocks her back and forth. She’s got lacerations on her arms, some slowly becoming scars and others becoming infected wounds. Blood is smeared across her face so he can’t quite tell where she’s been hurt there, but a portion of her right ear is missing.   
“James,” Natalia weeps and he doesn’t know whether she’s crying for him in some pain-induced illusion or she really knows he’s there, but he holds her anyway.  
“We have to go,” he tells her. “We have to get out of here. More will come.” She doesn’t respond except to continue sobbing and he braces himself and grips her bridal style and stands.   
He takes Natalia out the open door cautiously and then carries her down the hall. She’s trying to be quiet, he can tell, and she’s buried her face in his chest. He peeks down corners before taking them and he hopes he isn’t getting them more lost, but so far, they’ve seen no one.  
“I’m sorry,” Natalia mumbles between sobs. “I’m sorry for those things I said to you.”  
“It’s fine,” the Soldier says and he cradles her closer. He thinks maybe they ought to have this conversation later. “Don’t worry about it.”  
“I wanted to go back,” Natalia says. “To talk to you about it. I was about to turn around and then I was grabbed. Too many of them, I couldn’t fight them all.”  
“Shh, it’s okay,” he says. “They haven’t got either of us now. I’m getting us out and they’ll never touch us again.”  
“Can you forgive me?” Natalia asks and then the Winter Soldier finds the exit. He finds the garage with the van that had brought him here and he celebrates silently.  
“I forgave you weeks ago,” he tells her and takes her to the car, sitting her down in the passengers seat and running around to the other side to take the drivers seat and find the keys.  
“Wait,” Natalia says as he sits down and he looks up at her. “The money. They took my money.” The Winter Soldier stares at her for a second.  
“What?” He says. “The reward money?”  
“The check,” Natalia says and she starts to get out of the car.  
“Hey, wait, hold on!!” The Winter Soldier cries and he reaches across from her and takes the car door back from her, slamming it closed again. “Are you out of your mind?!” She looks at him and he recognizes her stern face, even through the tears and the dirt and the blood.  
“I have to go and get it back,” she says.  
“No, you don’t!” The Winter Soldier argues. “Did you not see what happened back there? We both barely got out with our lives, we got _lucky_! If you go back, we’ll die!”  
“It’s more important than that,” Natalia cries and she opens the door again. “It’s worth the chance.”


	25. Chapter 25

The Winter Soldier throws himself out of the car and follows her, pleading.  
“You can have a house!” He cries. “And clothes! And food! Steve will help, I’ll even work for you if I can, this check isn’t worth your life!”  
“It is,” Natalia says adamantly as they walk right back into the hell pit they came from.   
“It can’t have even been that much money!” The Winter Soldier cries and he puts his face in his hands and back again and stares at her. “Please, let’s go!!” Natalia turns and looks at him and she sucks in a breath and wipes tears off her face.  
“You can go if you want,” she says. “In fact, I _do_ want you to go. Get in that car and drive back to Rogers. You have everything you wanted! You have all that love and comfort that you’ve always dreamed of so just leave!”  
“I’m not leaving you behind!” He cries. “I love you, Natalia!”  
Natalia looks him up and down.  
“I love you, too,” she says quietly.  
“Then come back with me,” he begs and she swallows and blinks hard and shakes her head. “What will this money buy that I can’t eventually give you?”  
She looks at him.  
“The freedom for people like me,” she says quietly. “You’re remembering things, aren’t you, James? Do you remember how I escaped the KGB?”  
The Winter Soldier stares at her.  
“I…,” he says. “I got you out. I stole you.”  
“Exactly!” Natalia says. “And there are so many people like me, James, so many. I want to save them all like you saved me! I want to take them here, smuggle them out like I smuggled you! But it takes money, James! The plane tickets and the train tickets and the food and the board, so much I can’t even steal it all! That’s why I needed that reward, that’s why I was looking for someone to impersonate you! I need that money so I can save these people!”  
The Winter Soldier didn’t think he could love her any more, but he suddenly does.  
“Alright,” he says quietly. “Alright, okay. We’ll go get your money back.”  
“We?” She asks and he shrugs.  
“I’m not leaving you,” he says and she takes a deep breath and looks him up and down and bites her lip. Then, before he can say anything, she’s throwing herself at him and pressing her mouth to his. She takes his face in both bloodied hands and kisses him and when she comes up for air, she looks him straight in the eye and then turns around and runs.  
“Let’s go!” She cries and, still a little shell shocked, he breaks into a run to follow her.  
They dive back into the grey cemented halls they’d just escaped from and the Winter Soldier follows Natalia. A few times, she stumbles and he catches her and asks if she’s alright, but whether she is or not, she kisses his face and then continues to run.  
“Do you know where they could have taken it?” The Soldier asks.  
“I’m sort of hoping we can just do a search and kill anyone who gets in our way?” She calls back.  
“Impressive plan!” He says sarcastically and he can’t see, but he thinks it makes her smile.  
They battle their way through walls of agents and the Winter Soldier takes a bullet in the shoulder, but now’s not the time to complain about it and they keep going. After maybe a half an hour of searching and fighting, Natalia finds the room she claims they’d brought her originally and they tear it apart together.  
“Here!” Natalia cries and the Soldier turns around and sees her holding up a tiny piece of paper. Tears are welling in her eyes again. “It’s here! I _found_ it!” She looks at him and squeals. “I found it!”  
“Great!” He cries. “Now lets go!”  
Back out into the halls they go and they reach the car in record time, leaping over the bodies of agents they’ve dispatched, and the Winter Soldier throws himself into the drivers seat again. Natalia collapses into her chair, squeezing the check, and tears roll down her face. The Winter Soldier backs the van up and pulls it out of the garage and speeds out onto a nearby highway.


	26. Chapter 26

The car ride is long. The Winter Soldier isn’t sure where Steve’s apartment is and it’s dark and Natalia’s fading in and out of consciousness now. He’s taken her check and put it in his pants pocket for safe keeping and the bullet wound in his shoulder is really starting to slow him down. But he’s starting to recognize landmarks and he thinks they’ll get there in time.  
“I’m so sorry,” Natalia slurs quietly and he looks over. “I’m happy you’re alive, James. I want you to know that. I’m glad you survived.”  
The Winter Soldier looks ahead at the cars.  
“I just,” Natalia shifts and lets out a breath and looks at him with tired blue eyes. “I was just so heartbroken to hear what happened to you, I wanted to believe death would be kinder. Death would have involved less pain, for both of us. I was still grieving you.”  
The Soldier swallows and his hands tighten on the steering wheel.  
“I understand,” he says.  
“I think I always knew it was you,” she whispers to him. “I just couldn’t let myself believe it.”  
They arrive at Steve’s apartment as the sun is coming up and the Winter Soldier stumbles out. With the bullet in his arm, he doesn’t think he can carry Natalia again, but they can lean on each other and they go as far as they can. Natalia’s blacking out again and the Winter Soldier is squeezing her and patting her face and trying to keep her awake and that’s when he hears his name called, he looks up hopefully.  
Steve bursts out of the building and races for the Soldier and Natalia. Ambulances are called and they’re encouraged to lie down and people buzz around them with gurneys and face masks. They’re loaded into the ambulance and the Winter Soldier squeezes Natalia’s hand before his vision fades into black.


	27. Chapter 27

Natalia relates her story to Steve at his apartment once they return from the hospital and Bucky sits with her, watching Steve’s face.  
“You died trying to save her?” Steve asks Bucky and Bucky gives a shy shrug.  
“It worked out in the end,” he says and Steve gives him a sigh and a grin.  
“Count on you to fall off a cliff trying to smuggle someone else to safety,” he says.  
“So now I’m going back,” Natalia says. “I’ll be going back and forth until I can help everyone who needs it.”  
“If you ever need anything,” Steve says. “I’ll do everything I can.” Natalia smiles and thanks him, and then she stands.  
“I ought to be going,” she says. “My plane leaves in a few hours.”  
Bucky stands as well and looks at her. She smiles at him gently and cups his cheek in her hand.  
“I’ll be back,” she promises him. “I’ll see you again, James.”  
He follows her to the door like a puppy and as soon as Steve is out of sight, she kisses him hard on the mouth, breathing him in. He squeezes her, tears pricking at his eyes.  
“Come back soon,” he tells her.  
“I will,” she says.  
“Come back safe,” he continues and she takes in a breath.  
“I will,” she says again. And then she lets go and leaves and the door shuts behind her and Bucky returns to Steve with tears in his eyes.  
“I’ll miss her so much,” he says quietly and Steve looks at him and then sighs again.  
“You oughta go with her, Buck,” he says and Bucky’s head snaps up.  
“What?” He says. “No, I can’t, I…” Steve grins at him sadly.  
“You two have unfinished business in Russia,” he says. “That much is obvious.”  
“Steve,” Bucky says. “We just got back together.”  
“And now we have all the time in the world,” Steve says and he stands up and embraces Bucky. “Come back safe.”  
Bucky squeezes him back and tears roll down his cheeks.  
“I will,” he says.  
Bucky runs to catch up to Natalia, walking out in the parking lot, and she grins at him over her shoulder as though she’d been just waiting for him to return.  
“You’re coming with me?” She says and she links her arm through his once he catches up.  
“Of course,” Bucky says, as though he hadn’t been in tears moments ago. “Hydra’s still out there, they’ll still come for me. I gotta do something about that. And besides, I need to tell you more about what Bucky Barnes would and wouldn’t do, after all.” Natalia looks at him and laughs, resting her head on his shoulder. “You really think of me that highly?” He asks. “You really thought I was such a gentleman?” Natalia looks up at him, her eyes shining and a smirk on her face.  
“To be fair, I think you’ve proven me right,” she says. He leans down and kisses her again.  
“I love you, too,” he says.

THE END


End file.
